


Two Deals, Ten Years (the sulfur remix)

by goldenmagikarp



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Background Relationships, Demon Deals, M/M, Magic, Minor Sidney Crosby/Evgeni Malkin, Mpreg, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-18
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-04-19 07:37:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14232447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldenmagikarp/pseuds/goldenmagikarp
Summary: When Bettman comes calling, he offers it with a smile and the smell of brimstone.





	Two Deals, Ten Years (the sulfur remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kleinergruenerkaktus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kleinergruenerkaktus/gifts).
  * Inspired by [One Year, Three Mornings](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11267733) by [kleinergruenerkaktus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kleinergruenerkaktus/pseuds/kleinergruenerkaktus). 



No one expects to find Gary Bettman in their living room. No one. It is only with great calmness that Alex can even pretend this is normal, the commissioner showing up in Washington, Alex's fucking dogs silent and nowhere to be seen. 

"Ovechkin," he greets. "You have a nice home." 

"Thank you." Alex closes his eyes and does not ask, not when he can smell the stench of him. Bettman is in his living room. What was he supposed to do? "Did not expect to see you here. Would you like a drink? I would have bought better wine for guests." 

Alex has some manners, so he pretends that he doesn't have a slight urge to burn everything down and move. Bettman shakes his head and slowly, slowly gets his feet off of Alex's coffee table. "I think it's time I've left. Say hello to your team for me." 

"Okay." Alex pointedly starts opening more windows, and while Bettman is not a vampire, it could not _hurt_. 

"And tell Backstrom I need an answer," Bettman finishes, crossing over the threshold back to the outside world, and Alex can't tell if his eyes really flash red, but it makes his skin crawl. 

The world fades to normal, and the sounds of his large, friendly dogs enter his world. He pets one. The next thing he does is call his mother; demons in his house are not a good sign, and she'd be very disappointed at him, and she knows much more about this than he does. Alex cannot change the fact that the league commissioner is an actual demon‒he is just a hockey player‒but he can take measures to keep himself out of whatever Bettman aims to do. 

The third thing he does is call Nicky and tell him to bring salt and candles. 

"Nicky, will you exorcise my house," he asks his center, who walks in with a couple plastic grocery bags full of salt and various cheap drugstore candles like he doesn't have to even knock. Which he doesn't, admittedly. The door was open.

"No." Nicky sorts the salt and candles on Alex's kitchen counter, anyway. He takes a sniff, and he pulls the face like someone's bathed in sour milk and walked past him. It's not a good look on him. "Open more windows," and Alex already did, does Nicky think his house is made of windows? 

"What good are you, then?" Alex asks. "Why do I keep you around?" 

"I pass to you," and Nicky is right, he's very good at that. 

Later, Alex will ask, and Nicky will answer: "He offered for my first born." And Nicky isn't so removed that he can't help but add, "Again." 

"What do demons even do with babies?" Alex tries to be light, but it misses, and the silence is almost overwhelming. 

Nicky murmurs, while pouring salt into a dish, "It doesn't have to be an infant," and Alex really, really does not want to think about that, so he gets himself a drink and offers Nicky some of his good vodka. Alex knows that a Cup is something he wants, but maybe this is the problem with him that the Canadian hockey media doesn't outright say: he doesn't want a Cup bad enough to sell his soul for it. 

Bettman doesn't bother him or Nicky again. It's not the end of it. The league is competitive, and there are desperate men. Alex tries to reserve judgment about those who make deals, but there's always something about them. It goes away, at least, for those who aren't soulless, staring into the camera with dead, dark eyes. He wonders sometimes, if it's worth it. 

He wonders what Bettman wants so badly, when he tried to make Nicky's life miserable for saying 'no'. Bettman's never offered Alex a deal, and Alex is probably better off not having to make a choice, at that. But a deal has to be freely entered into, and all debts with a demon must be paid. 

It might be more trouble than it's worth, Alex thinks. 

The trouble with being in their division is that they play Pittsburgh four times a year. Nothing quite feels right, but it might still be the new year. Alex laces up, puts a smile on his face before slapping a mouthguard into it. He'll chew on it later. 

Burky opens the scoring, and Alex taps his stick with everyone else on his team. That's not so weird, but the feeling doesn't go away. Maybe it's just the need to score again, wearing down on Alex, and that's fine, he'll play some damn good hockey. On his next shift, he crushes a couple of black and yellow uniforms, and Alex gets the puck to TJ, and it's pretty damn magic. He looks up, sees that Nicky scores the goal, and everyone gets a hug. 

It's comfortable, a two-goal lead out of the first. Alex finds himself ending the intermission peptalk, not that they need one, with: "Alright, we take care of this, boys, and I'll be proud of you."

"Aren't you always?" Kuzya asks. "Have you been lying to us?" 

Alex just grins his gap-toothed smile while Chorns says something that has half the room laughing. 

Holts adds, "Score me about ten more, and I'll be proud of you." It's probably meant as a joke. 

It very quickly becomes _not_ a joke. The scoring doesn't end, and Holts leaves after the _fifth_ Penguins goal. 

They lose in overtime, and Alex feels like he's been put through a wringer while Evgeni fucking Malkin has a hat trick. They're still going for drinks after, but maybe they won't stay out too late. The game was long, and they all need rest. 

The uneasy feeling doesn't go away, but Alex is a professional, and he can meet his friends after games without too much bitterness. The kids don't want to tag along, and that's fine; Alex plans to get very smashingly drunk to forget this game has happened, and it might better that this happened on the road, but that also means that Zhenya gets to pick the place and drinks. 

So Alex buys Evgeni Malkin a steak dinner, and he doesn't even order a bottle of something expensive right away, and that could have been a concession of a pretty even win, but it's pretty obvious that something has happened. Zhenya doesn't even brag about his hat trick, and Alex doesn't have to defend Holts's honor. Of course, it helps that they scored just as many on Zhenya's goalie.

"What the fuck did you do?" Alex asks, after the waiter disappears, and leaves them with a long list of wines with no prices. 

"Nothing," Zhenya denies, but he's a liar through the skin of his teeth. He looks paler than usual. 

"What, and you just needed to score three goals tonight?" 

"Maybe, I don't fucking know. I'm the best hockey player in the world, why can't I?" Zhenya mutters something furiously. He's not making sense. "That's not what‒" 

Alex decides he really doesn't care what he thought he was doing, but, "You need to learn to lie better." Zhenya's surly, but he bites back something scathing, no doubt. "What'd he want?" Bettman's a demon, and while Zhenya can do what he likes with his soul, Alex is a little invested in his friends' souls. 

"It's not my _soul_ , and this is for hockey. I can't enjoy playing without one, can I?" 

Alex wants to make a joke about how he can still see a few of the others around the league pretend to enjoy hockey, but he doesn't. 

They eat in silence. 

***

Evgeni really fucking hates Sasha sometimes. There is a reason that they stopped talking for years, and he's still glad that they don't have to see each more often than when they play each other; they're friends now, but Alexander Ovechkin is best managed in small doses. Still, he's probably the only one who would ask or notice, and there's some worth to that‒Evgeni might even be touched at the concern, but that's for later, not now when Sasha wants to pepper him with questions and judge his life choices. 

He really should have let Sasha drive himself, but he wanted to show off his new Mercedes, so he answers one question, preemptively, in the car. "It was the only way." 

"For what?" Sasha squints. He looks like someone squirted lemon juice in his eyes. They won the Cup last year, and Evgeni wants another, but that would be a spectacularly stupid thing to sell his first born for. And Sasha is much smarter than he wants people to think, so he says, resigned, "The Olympics. The lockout? Both?" 

So Evgeni tells him. For all the gab Sasha talks, he is good at keeping secrets, at least big ones. The lockout and the Olympics and the price. That he said yes, and Sasha looks like he wants to throttle him at that, like he wasn't half-planning to find some way to go to Pyeongchang himself. 

"We're have something planned. He's not going to get what he wants," he settles for, not wanting to give away all the details. "Or at least not all of it."

"So you're getting a vasectomy?" He can see Sasha rolls the thought over in his head, and that's clever, but Evgeni likes his dick the way it is for at least a while more. He could also become an actual monk, but that's not going to happen. Sasha concedes, "Not the worst thing, but maybe you wanted kids." 

"No," Evgeni says. "You know about breaking deals. Trust me." 

"I don't," Sasha says, but he pulls out the business card of a witch anyway and leaves it on the seat when Evgeni drops him off at his hotel. "But ask me for help sooner than later, you stubborn asshole."

Evgeni flips him off as he gets out, but he's smiling when he drives away. With friends like that, he thinks he can handle it. Maybe. 

Breaking and subverting deals comes to bite people back worse than ever, which is why they had to think this one through. Sid already owed him one, for the concussions. And Evgeni is one of those men with the right parts, if needed, that modern medicine has figured out how to activate with pills and shots. And Bettman wanted their respective firstborns. 

At the very least, Bettman wouldn't be getting two. And at the best, he wouldn't be getting anything. Evgeni squishes the feeling he has when he thinks of the best case. There will be still be a kid, and it'll be _his_ and _Sid's_ and all that implies. That won't be undone, and Evgeni hopes they'll be able to forgive him‒forgive him and Sid, but mostly forgive him for bringing them into this. 

He still doesn't know how to handle that prospect. A curly haired kid, one that he hopes he doesn't have his nose. He'll have some time to get used to it. Probably.

(He won't, and he doesn't know what they're going to do if this works, if there's a kid with Sid's smile looking up at him, a part of him that Evgeni'll never have to give back, but also a part of Evgeni, too. Only if this works. Maybe it's selfish, to have made the deal and still want‒but Evgeni won't know how he feels until the time comes. And there's no going back on a deal with a demon. It's not something you can cancel.)

 

The Olympics pass, and true to Bettman's word, the NHL takes a break for the Olympics. It's not the same as Sochi, but nothing would ever be. The food's better, but Evgeni won't admit it; there's about the same amount of pressure, maybe even more, to prove the IOC wrong. There are some missing faces, still, due to retirement or some arbitrary ruling, but there's the wonder of the Olympics that doesn't quite ever wear off. 

And: 

Canada loses to Finland in the semi-finals. The Russian team‒and although they don't wear the eagles, they are still Team Russia‒beats out Sweden for the gold. 

(Sid doesn't talk to him, and well, it's only as expected. 

Except‒Evgeni takes three green pills with his meals. And unlike back in Pittsburgh, there's no one to rub his shoulders and make sympathetic noises at him when he downs them; they don't quite agree with him, and he's not sure if that's just one of the intended side effects or not.

He doesn't sneak into Evgeni's room, per se. Anisimov takes one look at how miserable Evgeni looks and says, "I don't want to get sick" and begs Bobrovsky to take the spare bed in his room; and sometimes you still have a soft spot for your old teammates and take pity on them. At least, Evgeni assumes Sergei took pity on him. He could be sleeping on someone else's floor for all he knows. 

But Sid shows up at his door with some of the seltzer that calms Evgeni's stomach down, as a peace offering, and they don't talk about how he won't be going home with a medal. They sit, and they've been done talking for awhile.

Sid says: "Good luck," like Evgeni needs it at all. He turns on that crooked smile of his, and he says, "I heard that Dahlin kid is pretty good." An understatement, really. 

Evgeni smiles at him, and they can be professionals about the Olympics, but there's also the other thing. 

"Don't do anything stupid," Sid settles for, despite looking like he wants to tell Evgeni so many other things. He even adds, "Please." 

"Too late for that." He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. "But that one's okay." 

"Well, yeah, G," Sid says. "But we already said we'd do that together." 

Sid does sneak _out_ in the morning.)

Evgeni told his teammates that the pills are an antibiotic, and that drinking will probably make him piss blood, so they might begrudgingly lay off of him for not even celebrating _an Olympic Gold medal_ properly. Sasha even crowds against him and crows, "Right, so we'll have drink for him!" and Evgeni might owe him an answer later. 

Evgeni wears a gold medal on his chest, and it doesn't feel like cheating, except: there's always the possibility that Bettman threw that in to sweeten the deal, and nowadays, Evgeni can't tell if the queasy feeling in his stomach is from devil magic or from the treatments. 

And maybe he is a stubborn asshole because Evgeni's confirmed three months pregnant when he finally calls Sasha's witch. 

***

He gets the call on a Thursday. He answers with a, "Well met," in English, and then again in Swedish, just in case, but the number has an American country code. 

"Huh, Swedish witch," an accented voice says, and fuck, Nicklas can almost recognize that voice. It's a Russian accent anyway, and that just tells him that Alex probably had something to do with this. For all his faults, Alex would not give out his number for a joke. Except maybe he would, so Nicklas hangs up, without so much as an exasperated, 'Did you mean to call Ovi?' 

He texts Alex and checks if he has any coffee in the kitchen. He puts down his phone, looking at the back of it, just in case he managed to pickpocket Alex when he was drunk and forgot to give his phone back. But no, it's the same shiny glass back. 

Alex texts back: ((((( Nicky why did you hang up. He's mad at me now 

Nicklas picks up when he gets another call, and now that he's more awake, that definitely is Evgeni Malkin on the other side. 

"So, you're a witch?" he says, no preamble. "I wouldn't have thought so." 

And Nicklas does not want to give Malkin his life story, so he asks. "What's the problem?" 

He gets the short version, the kind without any names, but he gets the gist. Only Alex knows if Malkin is only Alex's friend that week, but he listens. Apparently he has a plan, and it might even work. 

Nicklas doesn't know how he gets talked into it, but it might come with Alex needlessly flattering him on a conference call with, 'You're the best witch I know, Backy,' like he knows many other witches, and maybe it's the pettiness in him that they're going to try to outdeal Bettman, that Bettman likes fucking with hockey players' lives and Nicklas has a chance to deal some sort of blow to him‒but he does. 

In about a week, there are two Pittsburgh Penguins in his kitchen. Nicklas resisted both the urge to make sure all the Caps mugs he's ever been gifted are on the counter when they arrive and pulling out the tiny Swedish flag that Andre got him for his office desk. 

"I wasn't expecting you," he says, to Sidney Crosby's face. "Is this your problem?" 

"Well," he starts, and that's a more complicated answer than it seems because Nicklas didn't get all the details. It's a little too much‒Malkin's fucking _pregnant_ , even if he's not showing that much. Maybe Malkin needed the moral support, and if you're a Penguin, you might actually get Sidney Crosby to come with you. 

When Nicklas asks Malkin, "Why so soon? You just made this deal, and you didn't have to do it this soon‒" Deals ran for years, most often ten, twenty years. Crosby puts a hand at the small of Malkin's back, and the answer is silence. 

Being a witch does not mean he can solve all problems, so when Malkin asks: "Does this change something?" 

Nicklas thought he had more time to think of something, but it does open up other options. 

On the upside, Crosby is very organized. Nicklas had barely shooed them inside before Crosby produced a journal and records of everything they've been doing, from the old things that you'd do to drive the old folk away to about three different protective charms on Malkin that Nicklas can just smell coming off of him, to planning and trying to get swaddling blankets woven by an obscure religious sect, all laid out on the table. 

It's also a little ballsy, to think that they could have enough power on their side so that Bettman chooses against taking the child, but it's something. It's possible, and they've started down that path already. 

Nicklas is not sure this is going to work. He looks away from where Crosby and Malkin are talking, heads bend down, having their own private moment, holding hands under his damn kitchen table. But they believe, he thinks, and that might be the most important part in all of this.


End file.
